Wednesday, May 30, 2012

BBTF.org Beta

The site beta launch is at hand. Today I am finishing up the creation of the Beta membership group and will be moving all the volunteers into that group. Starting tomorrow morning all of them will see a link to the beta at the top of the home page when they log into the site.

Here’s a screenshot of the new homepage:

For the most part the beta is self-contained; that is, you can view the site entirely within the beta, including using your mobile device. At this point the exceptions are the new member profile pages and the archives.

The framework for the micros is in place:

One of the primary reasons I am opening the beta is to get input from our new volunteer moderators on the design and to get help setting up our new moderation system. At the same time I’m looking for additional input and feedback on the updated mobile design.

In conjunction with opening the beta I will begin work on the new archive by converting our older blogs to the new setup. This means some of this content will not be available on the live site until the redesign is finished. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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I was able to log in at the Beta site (I did not get a response via e-mail either, I figure that'll come when it's up and running). I don't think we "have the keys" yet, but we can log in and check out the design.

Everyone who volunteered so far will be part of the beta. As I mentioned in the original thread, in cases where multiple people volunteer they will be encouraged to work together.

FYI, not all page views have been created for this part of the beta. For example, the customized homepage has not yet been created. Additionally, the views for New (recently submitted content), Most Popular (stuff that people vote up) have not been added to the homepage or the micros. These views will be added in the next couple of weeks.

So, I've just played with the Beta for ten minutes, and I have two immediate questions / criticisms. I figure I'll post them here, in case either (a) other people have figured out solutions already or (b) other people want to discuss the Beta.

1) I would like to co-ordinate with other people in the Red Sox / ST micros, but I can't find any information on the site as to who the other admins are for the micro. How can I co-ordinate with them? Can there be a simple "admin list" area with contact links? Or is there one and I'm blind to it?

2) A thing I don't like: When I go into a thread, my "hot topics" bar changes to the "hot topics" for only that Micro. I checked out the Mike Trout thread, and I lost the full hot topics sidebar, to have it replaced with the sidebar for the micros linked in that thread (Padres and scouting). In order to navigate, I need to go back to the main page every time I want to see what the current active general threads are. This is annoying for me, and I liked it the way the old/current site works.

I see that there are two hot topics tabs - "hot topics" (which has the hot topics for the linked micros of the thread) and "my hot topics" (which has my bookmarked threads). Would it be possible to add a third tab, so that I can see in my hot topics bar "(general/newsblog) hot topics" (which would basically be the hot topics bar as it currently exists on the site) plus the "micro hot topics" and "my hot topics"? Does that make sense?

Until I expand the beta to more users, I suggest people use the forum area to discuss the beta.

Since I'm here, though, I will answer your questions.

1) I haven't set up the moderator blocks and moderator areas yet. I want to get some ideas from the participants before doing so. At this point I plan on adding a moderator block to the sidebar which will contain a list of the moderators, including links to send messages to them. There will also be some embedded moderation links so moderators can easily change the entry status, fix typos, or close bad entries. There will also be a dedicated area for moderator discussions, including a page for each micro.

2) Actually the current site has different Hot Topics on each of the blogs. If you go to Sox Therapy the Hot Topics only contain Sox Therapy links. I can add another tab if other people feel the same way. We'll have to try it out.

Love the beta. Cleaner site, more focus, less clutter. Microblogging/tagging works well and seems inclusive, not the other way around as some speculated above. Reason - all content streams through the main page. So you can focus on microblogs, or take it all in. Hopefully this was deliberate.

Looking forward to more. Assuming at some point we can see members of each microblog, etc.

I am able to access the Beta, but not able to access the forum thread about the beta: " You are not authorized to view this forum"

I just wanted to comment that while I like the layout (although I dislike the comic sansiness of it.) I do not like that when you click on an article about the Johan Santana no-hitter, it takes you to the Mets micro and all the hot topics are populated with only Mets threads. Maybe have two Hot Topics, one that's Mets focused and one that's the global one? Sort of like YouTube how it has "related videos" but then also has the other list from when you originally searched.

Love the beta. Cleaner site, more focus, less clutter. Microblogging/tagging works well and seems inclusive, not the other way around as some speculated above. Reason - all content streams through the main page. So you can focus on microblogs, or take it all in. Hopefully this was deliberate.

Thanks. Yes, it was deliberate. I want to keep things working essentially the same but streamline the setup (by making everything go through the frontpage) while also making it easier to both submit and find more specific content.

Shock, I changed the forum permissions so you should be able to see it now. I've had a few other people suggest an additional Hot Topic tab. I should be able to add it either today or tomorrow.

The beta site layout seems nice enough. Don't think it is appreciably better than the current layout honestly. However, the font used on the beta site is terrible. It makes it much harder to quickly parse text. Use the same font as the current site. No reason to change it.

Randy, there is a lot more white space so I don't think it's as clutters. I tried to keep some of old design (the comment layout, for example) to have some connection to the old design. The font might change. If you are a designer and have suggestions I would love to hear them

I'm not a designer per se, but I do a lot of web development, so I end up doing a lot of design like work. Not really speaking from that experience though. I just found it very hard to parse the text on the beta site and it is totally caused by the font.

Just something that I was thinking of, but is there a way to give us the ability to change how the title of a thread appears in our bookmarks? So, for example, I bookmark a thread that used to be about baseball but after 400 pages is about movies and can have it read as "Movie thread" to me.